NeurIPS 2024 Papers

Visual Grounding aims to localize the referring object in an image given a natural language expression. Recent advancements in DETR-based visual grounding methods have attracted considerable attention, as they directly predict the coordinates of the target object without relying on additional efforts, such as pre-generated proposal candidates or pre-defined anchor boxes. However, existing research primarily focuses on designing stronger multi-modal decoder, which typically generates learnable queries by random initialization or by using linguistic embeddings. This vanilla query generation approach inevitably increases the learning difficulty for the model, as it does not involve any target-related information at the beginning of decoding. Furthermore, they only use the deepest image feature during the query learning process, overlooking the importance of features from other levels. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach, called RefFormer. It consists of the query adaption module that can be seamlessly integrated into CLIP and generate the referential query to provide the prior context for decoder, along with a task-specific decoder. By incorporating the referential query into the decoder, we can effectively mitigate the learning difficulty of the decoder, and accurately concentrate on the target object. Additionally, our proposed query adaption module can also act as an adapter, preserving the rich knowledge within CLIP without the need to tune the parameters of the backbone network. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches on five visual grounding benchmarks.

We introduce a new benchmark designed to advance the development of general-purpose, large-scale vision-language models for remote sensing images. Although several vision-language datasets in remote sensing have been proposed to pursue this goal, existing datasets are typically tailored to single tasks, lack detailed object information, or suffer from inadequate quality control. Exploring these improvement opportunities, we present a Versatile vision-language Benchmark for Remote Sensing image understanding, termed VRSBench. This benchmark comprises 29,614 images, with 29,614 human-verified detailed captions, 52,472 object references, and 123,221 question-answer pairs. It facilitates the training and evaluation of vision-language models across a broad spectrum of remote sensing image understanding tasks. We further evaluated state-of-the-art models on this benchmark for three vision-language tasks: image captioning, visual grounding, and visual question answering. Our work aims to significantly contribute to the development of advanced vision-language models in the field of remote sensing. The data and code can be accessed at https://vrsbench.github.io.

Visual grounding is a common vision task that involves grounding descriptive sentences to the corresponding regions of an image. Most existing methods use independent image-text encoding and apply complex hand-crafted modules or encoder-decoder architectures for modal interaction and query reasoning. However, their performance significantly drops when dealing with complex textual expressions. This is because the former paradigm only utilizes limited downstream data to fit the multi-modal feature fusion. Therefore, it is only effective when the textual expressions are relatively simple. In contrast, given the wide diversity of textual expressions and the uniqueness of downstream training data, the existing fusion module, which extracts multimodal content from a visual-linguistic context, has not been fully investigated. In this paper, we present a simple yet robust transformer-based framework, SimVG, for visual grounding. Specifically, we decouple visual-linguistic feature fusion from downstream tasks by leveraging existing multimodal pre-trained models and incorporating additional object tokens to facilitate deep integration of downstream and pre-training tasks. Furthermore, we design a dynamic weight-balance distillation method in the multi-branch synchronous learning process to enhance the representation capability of the simpler branch. This branch only consists of a lightweight MLP, which simplifies the structure and improves reasoning speed. Experiments on six widely used VG datasets, i.e., RefCOCO/+/g, ReferIt, Flickr30K, and GRefCOCO, demonstrate the superiority of SimVG. Finally, the proposed method not only achieves improvements in efficiency and convergence speed but also attains new state-of-the-art performance on these benchmarks. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/Dmmm1997/SimVG.

Instruction following is crucial in contemporary LLM. However, when extended to multimodal setting, it often suffers from misalignment between specific textual instruction and targeted local region of an image. To achieve more accurate and nuanced multimodal instruction following, we introduce Instruction-guided Visual Masking (IVM), a new versatile visual grounding model that is compatible with diverse multimodal models, such as LMM and robot model. By constructing visual masks for instruction-irrelevant regions, IVM-enhanced multimodal models can effectively focus on task-relevant image regions to better align with complex instructions. Specifically, we design a visual masking data generation pipeline and create an IVM-Mix-1M dataset with 1 million image-instruction pairs. We further introduce a new learning technique, Discriminator Weighted Supervised Learning (DWSL) for preferential IVM training that prioritizes high-quality data samples. Experimental results on generic multimodal tasks such as VQA and embodied robotic control demonstrate the versatility of IVM, which as a plug-and-play tool, significantly boosts the performance of diverse multimodal models, yielding new state-of-the-art results across challenging multimodal benchmarks. Code, model and data are available at https://github.com/2toinf/IVM.

We introduce GrounDiT, a novel training-free spatial grounding technique for text-to-image generation using Diffusion Transformers (DiT). Spatial grounding with bounding boxes has gained attention for its simplicity and versatility, allowing for enhanced user control in image generation. However, prior training-free approaches often rely on updating the noisy image during the reverse diffusion process via backpropagation from custom loss functions, which frequently struggle to provide precise control over individual bounding boxes. In this work, we leverage the flexibility of the Transformer architecture, demonstrating that DiT can generate noisy patches corresponding to each bounding box, fully encoding the target object and allowing for fine-grained control over each region. Our approach builds on an intriguing property of DiT, which we refer to as semantic sharing. Due to semantic sharing, when a smaller patch is jointly denoised alongside a generatable-size image, the two become semantic clones. Each patch is denoised in its own branch of the generation process and then transplanted into the corresponding region of the original noisy image at each timestep, resulting in robust spatial grounding for each bounding box. In our experiments on the HRS and DrawBench benchmarks, we achieve state-of-the-art performance compared to previous training-free approaches. Project Page: https://groundit-diffusion.github.io/.

We introduce Language Feedback Models (LFMs) that identify desirable behaviour --- actions that help achieve tasks specified in the instruction - for imitation learning in instruction following. To train LFMs, we obtain feedback from Large Language Models (LLMs) on visual trajectories verbalized to language descriptions. First, by using LFMs to identify desirable behaviour to imitate, we improve in task-completion rate over strong behavioural cloning baselines on three distinct language grounding environments (Touchdown, ScienceWorld, and ALFWorld). Second, LFMs outperform using LLMs as experts to directly predict actions, when controlling for the number of LLM output tokens. Third, LFMs generalize to unseen environments, improving task-completion rate by 3.5-12.0% through one round of adaptation. Finally, LFMs can be modified to provide human-interpretable feedback without performance loss, allowing human verification of desirable behaviour for imitation learning.

Shape assembly is a ubiquitous task in daily life, integral for constructing complex 3D structures like IKEA furniture. While significant progress has been made in developing autonomous agents for shape assembly, existing datasets have not yet tackled the 4D grounding of assembly instructions in videos, essential for a holistic understanding of assembly in 3D space over time. We introduce IKEA Video Manuals, a dataset that features 3D models of furniture parts, instructional manuals, assembly videos from the Internet, and most importantly, annotations of dense spatio-temporal alignments between these data modalities. To demonstrate the utility of IKEA Video Manuals, we present five applications essential for shape assembly: assembly plan generation, part-conditioned segmentation, part-conditioned pose estimation, video object segmentation, and furniture assembly based on instructional video manuals. For each application, we provide evaluation metrics and baseline methods. Through experiments on our annotated data, we highlight many challenges in grounding assembly instructions in videos to improve shape assembly, including handling occlusions, varying viewpoints, and extended assembly sequences.

While humans effortlessly discern intrinsic dynamics and adapt to new scenarios, modern AI systems often struggle. Current methods for visual grounding of dynamics either use pure neural-network-based simulators (black box), which may violate physical laws, or traditional physical simulators (white box), which rely on expert-defined equations that may not fully capture actual dynamics. We propose the Neural Material Adaptor (NeuMA), which integrates existing physical laws with learned corrections, facilitating accurate learning of actual dynamics while maintaining the generalizability and interpretability of physical priors. Additionally, we propose Particle-GS, a particle-driven 3D Gaussian Splatting variant that bridges simulation and observed images, allowing back-propagate image gradients to optimize the simulator. Comprehensive experiments on various dynamics in terms of grounded particle accuracy, dynamic rendering quality, and generalization ability demonstrate that NeuMA can accurately capture intrinsic dynamics. Project Page: https://xjay18.github.io/projects/neuma.html.